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ATI Radeon HD 3870X2 1 GB |
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Written by Nebojsa Todorovic
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Tuesday, 22 January 2008 |
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Page 2 of 3
This card reports as a single unified piece of hardware in Windows, which is a better solution than virtually separating the two “twins”. Although it goes by the codename R680, we are dealing with two R670 chips, however, a marketing difference had to be made. Basically, all the characteristics of an ordinary HD 3870 are present, just multiplied by two. That means: 2x320 stream processors, 2x16 ROPs and so on. Just like the other HD 3xxx series models, this card has native support for DirectX 10.1, Shader Model 4.1 and OpenGL 2.0.
The GPUs were manufactured in 55 nm. Even though the official statement about the card's consumption has not yet been made, it doesn't take lots of brain to figure out that if a single HD 3870 has a peak consumption of 105 W, this card is going up to ~200 W.
The card occupies the PCI-E 2.0 slot, which implies that additional power connectors are required – one 6-pin and one 8-pin (note, however, that a motherboard supporting the PCI-E 2.0 standard natively can deliver up to 150 W straight through the graphics slot, so you could probably get by with just one of the power connectors attached if you have one of these mobos).
This requires a PSU of fair quality, but if you are aiming at this card, this is unlikely to present a problem. Bandwidth is no problem here, especially because of the PCI-E 2.0 support. The memory bus is 256 bits wide, but, since there is 512 MB of VRAM reserved for each GPU, it wouldn't be wrong to call it a 512-bit one either. This sort of memory subsystem provides a bandwidth of around 120 GB/s, which means that memory will never be a bottleneck.
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Graphics cards 
